Heavy Networking

Joining the discussion is Russ White, an experienced network engineer and author with decades in the field. He delves into whether IT favors younger professionals willing to embrace long hours and learning curves compared to seasoned veterans. The conversation covers the intense Silicon Valley grind, how modern networking's complexity can overwhelm newcomers, and the risk AI poses to entry-level roles. Russ highlights the importance of experience in navigating tech and the evolving landscape of IT roles driven by automation.

In this discussion, Andy Lapteff, a former CLI lifer and now a product marketing manager, shares his transformative journey into network automation and programming. He recounts his initial resistance to coding and his evolution through various roles at major companies like Verizon and Comcast. Andy vividly describes the challenges of adopting automation, including the fears around job loss from AI. He also emphasizes the importance of storytelling in overcoming biases against automation and showcases his commitment to community learning through his podcast.

Unit testing is a software development practice for checking that an individual component of code works before integrating that unit with other components in a larger program. A new open source project called Network Unit Testing System, or NUTS, brings the same concept to network automation. The big idea is that by incorporating unit tests into... Read more »

Steve Feldman, a veteran member of NANOG's Board of Directors, shares insights on the evolution of this crucial organization. He discusses NANOG's origins and key milestones, the symbiotic relationship with IETF, and how the internet landscape has shifted operator-vendor communications. Feldman emphasizes NANOG's role in tackling current hype cycles and maintaining relevance in a blurring service-provider landscape. He also highlights upcoming focuses, including AI and site reliability engineering, while reinforcing NANOG’s mission to educate the global networking community.

How do you architect a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) to provide critical security services to millions of endpoints distributed across the planet? How do you build such a service for scale, performance, and resiliency? One option is to build your own PoPs or use colocation facilities, run your own infrastructure stack, and connect everything... Read more »

On today’s episode, we take a break from one’s and zero’s for a discussion about starting a networking meetup. Our guest is Steinn “Steinzi” Örvar, who recently founded the ISNOG, a network operators’ group in Iceland. We quiz Steinzi about what worked and what didn’t. We also pick his brain for the nitty-gritty details about... Read more »

The architecture and tech stack of a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solution will influence how the service performs, the robustness of its security controls, and the complexity of its operations. Sponsor Fortinet joins Heavy Networking to make the case that a unified offering, which integrates SD-WAN and SSE from a single vendor, provides a... Read more »

Could an LLM or some kind of an AI-driven language model, such as a natural language interface, someday replace our beloved CLI? That is, instead of needing to understand the syntax of a specific vendor’s CLI, could a language model allow network operators to use plain language to get the information they need or the... Read more »

Today’s show is one of those “We’re living in the future” episodes, where we talk about using AI to perform root cause analysis of a performance issue. But not root cause analysis for just the networking part of the stack. The full stack. Why? Because it’s not good enough to say “it’s not the network”.... Read more »

If you’ve got an Autonomous System Number (ASN) and an IPv6 block, you too can multi-home IPv6 to your home lab! Sounds easy, right? Well, maybe…but today we’re going to discuss why you’d want to and how you can do that with guest Anton Lönnerbro. Anton is a solutions architect at a managed service provider... Read more »